How fast is too fast?

The Olympic Games, for all their meticulously planned pageantry and high-minded purpose, have a way of producing unpleasant events that don’t follow the carefully crafted script — ranging from embarrassing incidents to real disasters.

The horrific accident that killed a young luge competitor from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia on Friday certainly qualifies as the latter. Nodar Kumaritashvili, 21, was in a practice run on Friday, before the games officially began, when he was thrown from his sled and out of the half-pipe track into a steel stanchion at high speed.

He got immediate medical attention, but died shortly thereafter. No one who has seen the gruesome video of the accident is surprised by the tragedy.

And some critics are saying that a serious crash involving any luger on the Whistler Sliding Centre track is no surprise either. There have been claims that the track is poorly designed — unpadded steel beams inches from the track wall? — and too fast.

(Reportedly, the man who designed this track knew nothing about the sport at the time he was designated, but insisted that he was a fast learner.)

Mr. Kumaritashvili, who had practiced on the Whistler run 26 times in the past without incident, was said to be going almost 90 mph at the time of impact. But other lugers had been clocked at speeds of nearly 96 mph on the track.

Of course, accidents are going to happen in a sport like this, but critics, including top-flight performers in the sport, say that the speed on this track means there will be more of them and the injuries from those accidents will be far more grave.

Other lugers had noted the track’s dangers in conversations among themselves and with reporters before the competition began. One curve they called “50-50” in reference to a luger’s chances of making it through without a crash.

Australia luger Hannah Campbell-Pegg said, “To what extent are we just little lemmings that they just throw down a track and we’re crash-test dummies? I mean, this is our lives.”

Put in the context of the Olympic officials’ frenzied push to spice up the menu of traditional winter sports by adding risky extreme sports, pushing the envelope in emphasizing speed at the expense of safety, her charge seems to have some resonance.

Adding to that sense was some officials’ shameless rush to declare the fatal accident the result of human error and not track design — even as they hastily put up barriers where Mr. Kumaritashvili flew out of the track and hit the post. Their defensiveness speaks volumes.

The Olympic motto is "Citius, altius, fortius" — “Faster, higher, stronger.” But how fast is too fast in a sport that involves rocketing down an ice-covered chute, with little control, at insane speeds on a glorified basket with rails?